Reading Lesson Overview

My first focus student Heather was a part of my first lesson, and she is considered one of the advanced literacy students in the classroom. Every time I pull her out for her literacy unit testing, she aces the test without much struggle at all. The only thing that holds her back is her behavior. When something doesn’t interest her, she makes that very clear. I often observe her swinging her head back and forth or rolling around on the ground during class time while the rest of the class are sitting Indian style at group. The target area I chose for my first lesson was phonemic awareness, and it was for sounds that they were going to be learning the week I was going to teach my lesson, so the sounds they will be working with will still be relatively new to them and challenging to a degree. I believe this is appropriate for Heather because she doesn’t have any experience with the /u/ sound and the mini lesson involved lots of practice with the sound that could help her master it. She picks up on things quickly, so I am confident in her ability to participate successfully in the mini-lesson.

My second focus student Laura was a part of my second lesson, and she is considered one of the on-level students when it comes to literacy in my classroom. She generally scores well on her weekly unit literacy tests, but it takes her much more time and concentration than some of the other students in the class. I have noticed a great improvement in the time it takes her to answer questions in the past few weeks however, which is very exciting to see. The target area I chose for my second lesson was words/alphabet because the students have just been introduced to and began working with the letter u and the sound /u/, so this would be further exposure and practice for the students. I think the nature of my mini-lesson will help them practice with words that they might never have thought started with u or that had the letter u in them, and also practice with the /u/ sound which will help them when they are sounding out words. She is a very organized student who has great listening skills and lots of motivation, so I am excited to be working with her especially because I don’t get to work with her in small groups or individually very often.